


Worth

by Ray_Writes



Category: Doctor Who, Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: Gen, Post-Episode: s11e03 Rosa, References to Canon, and previous episodes
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-11-20
Updated: 2018-11-20
Packaged: 2019-08-26 16:40:56
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,137
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16685299
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Ray_Writes/pseuds/Ray_Writes
Summary: The Doctor grapples with her past andthepast in the wake of what happened in Montgomery.





	Worth

**Author's Note:**

> This took me longer to write than I wanted, but basically I just wanted to delve deeper into the characters' thoughts after "Rosa" beyond just the nice wrap-it-up-in-a-bow ending the episode gave us. Hopefully you find it interesting!

The Doctor had shut the doors on Asteroid 284996 and done a hop, skip, and a jump back to the controls before the others had fully turned around.

“Right, so, eleventh attempt—”

“Fifteenth,” Graham maintained.

“This next attempt,” she continued regardless, “will be home. Promise this time.”

Yaz was sharing a quick look with both Graham and Ryan. Some kind of silent communication. They were quite good at that.

“Actually, Doctor,” she said, taking two steps up towards the console. “Think we might all want a bit of a rest before heading back.”

“Yeah, there wasn’t much sleep happening at that motel,” Graham added.

“What about you, Ryan?” The Doctor asked.

He shrugged. He was a shrugger, that Ryan. “Could do with some, yeah.”

The Doctor nodded to herself and stepped back from the controls. “Alright then. Sleep first, Sheffield later. Good plan.”

“Right, well, goodnight. Just down this hall here, right Doc?”

“Yep. Pick any room. The TARDIS will have made it for you.”

Not that they were staying. It wasn’t their rooms just as the clothes they’d been borrowing from the TARDIS weren’t their clothes. They weren’t staying. She knew that.

“How’d it do that?” Yaz asked, a curious tilt to her head.

“More of that dimensional engineering, Yaz,” she answered.

The girl shook her head and followed after Graham. Ryan shuffled along behind her as well.

The Doctor called over her shoulder a, “Night, Ryan.”

She heard him stop, and there was a quiet, “Night,” echoed back at her. The Doctor smiled to herself and leaned back over the controls. 

She’d study them all night if she had to, just to be sure she got it right tomorrow. Imagining the looks on their faces when they stepped outside back home—

“Thanks for showing us Rosa Parks,” said Ryan suddenly, and she jumped. She’d thought he’d gone off to his not-room. “The person and the asteroid. It was worth it.”

The Doctor spun around, but Ryan had already disappeared down the corridor.

The smile slowly faded from her face. Worth it. She didn’t have to be a genius to know what he’d meant.

Had it been worth it? The constant remarks, the indignities, the slap. The threats on his life that had made her stomach churn and her blood boil.

Her friends were not always safe when they traveled with her. But the harm that had come to Ryan these past two days was different.

She kept going back to that moment, replaying it over and over in her mind. Replaying the different ways time could have diverged.

In one, she intervenes ahead of Yaz, telling the man off instead of deescalating. He calls an officer and the whole lot of them are thrown in jail. Krasko’s plan continues uninterrupted.

In another, she hits the man back. She’s done it before, and it feels just as good — for the moment. The other white men in the area, they react. It becomes a frenzy, a mob, Ryan pushing past Graham to help her only to get overwhelmed by the crowd instead. They’re driven from the town with sticks and rocks, and there’s the light of distant torches approaching—

In  _ the _ one, the only one that matters now because it is what has happened, her mouth falls open but she is wordless. She watches Yaz assert her authority, watches Graham place himself in front of Ryan, and watches Rosa talk the man down. The Doctor does nothing.

She could kid herself. Say she was simply so preoccupied with the temporal anomalies going on that she hadn’t been in the right frame of mind to react.

But the truth was, in over two-thousand years of traveling, she’d been totally unprepared to act at all.

The Doctor squeezed her eyes shut and let out a pitiful groan. She’d told herself this was a fresh start, a clean break of things for her after so many years of self doubt and recriminations. But her past informed her present just as much as it always had.

She’d been lucky in the past to never come up against that hostile of a presence to one of her friends. The less charitable side of her mind said that luck probably came from the majority of her friends having had an appearance deemed acceptable to previous times in Earth’s history. Had that been random, or a subconscious choice on her own part?

What of her own appearance? She still remembered the advice she’d given a nervous Martha Jones, out on her first official trip to the past.

_ Just walk about like you own the place. Works for me. _

She could kick herself now. Of course it had worked for her- him-  _ them. _ Pronouns were so confusing. But the invisible truth her past self had failed to acknowledge was that his face alone had granted him the status of one who owned the place whether that was the fifteenth, twenty-first, or seventy-ninth century. That lack of context could have placed Martha in serious danger, the more she thought of it now. Walking about like normal had nearly placed Ryan in danger right before her eyes, and all because of one simple act of kindness he’d tried to perform.

It wasn’t working nearly so well for her anymore, either. She hadn’t missed the way Officer Mason’s eyes had slid from her to Graham every time he had some serious question. How it was Graham,  and not her, that he assumed was the authority. The Doctor had grown accustomed to commanding attention wherever she went, but it was only growing clearer to her just how much of that had been attributed to her appearance. She’d taken that for granted.

How many times had the friends she’d asked along complained about the local customs? About being demoted to dinner ladies or plucky girls, and she’d asked them to play along just to avoid ruffling any additional feathers? History was delicate, yes, but how much had she asked the people in her care to sacrifice in deference to it?

Her thoughts returned again and again to those ignorant words she’d spoken so many centuries ago.

_ Besides, you’d be surprised. Elizabethan England, not so different from your time. _

And Montgomery, Alabama was not so different from her new friends’ time either. Only instead of pointing out harmless similarities, she’d led Ryan and Yasmin right into the ugliness those eras shared.

Had it been worth it? Rosa and all those activists, all those people fighting their whole lives for change, would likely say so. Ryan had said it was himself. But the Doctor couldn’t help wishing there was something more she could have done, some other adventure she was sending these wonderful humans home after. They deserved to see the wonders of the universe, but she’d only brought them desolate landscapes and pain.

The Doctor pushed away from the controls and shook out her arms. She didn’t much like all the wallowing this go around. Her mind and body were demanding she do something about it. Without the option to change time, she thought she could try talking instead.

She set off down a corridor at a quick march, trusting the TARDIS to lead her true. In a few minutes, she came to a doorway at the intersection of two corridors and reached out to knock.

“I’m asleep.”

“Don’t sound like it.”

She heard Ryan mutter something and approximately two minutes and twenty-three seconds later his door was open. He wasn’t even dressed for sleep.

“Something the matter? Did we land on another planet?”

“Haven’t landed anywhere yet,” she told him. “Just thought I’d come by if you were still awake.” The Doctor poked her head through the doorway. “This is your room, then? It’s nice.”

It was a large, open space, plenty of room between all the furniture. A couple of lights here and there that weren’t too bright, and the bed looked so soft and inviting it was hard not to just give into the impulse to simply run and jump at it.

“I like it. Yeah. Thanks,” he said.

“Oh, don’t thank me. It’s all the TARDIS,” the Doctor replied. She teetered back and forth on her feet for a few seconds. “Anyway…”

Ryan watched her. He didn’t say much, never forced things to go on. So she couldn’t count on his prodding to force her into saying it. Right then.

The Doctor drew in a breath and then said in a rush, “Ryan, I’m very sorry about the last couple days and it really means a lot to me that you feel it was worth it, but I felt it had to be said. I should have done more for you.”

“That’s okay,” Ryan said, but his eyes were on the floor.

“No, it isn’t.” She stepped up closer, placing herself in his sight-line. Look at that! Shortness did have its advantages. “It isn’t okay because it never  _ was _ okay. Humanity is amazing, but they have put their own people through so much pain and outrage for centuries for no fault of theirs. And I didn’t help.” She frowned, looking down herself. “I do what I can, but I haven’t done nearly enough.”

She’d avoided it, if anything. Spent time in palaces and amongst leaders instead of with the people they’d subjugated. Flirted with founders of a government that touted freedom as an ideal while punting the issue of slavery down the road for others to fight and die to end.

Donna Noble had been appalled by the Ood and moreover that the Doctor had already known about them.  _ I was busy, _ she’d told her best friend. But the Doctor hadn’t been, not really. Perhaps the truth was she’d just put up blinders to it the same way the Londoners ignored the labor that went into the cheap clothes they bought.

“One person can’t stop all that,” said Ryan, drawing her out of her thoughts. “Krasko had one thing right. Small actions. And Rosa had to do it.”

That was true. None of her faces could have sat in Rosa’s place. None of them could have changed the world the way she and every other plaintiff in the case to end segregation, every activist in every march, every volunteer to register the voiceless to vote had done.

“So I’m alright with what happened. It had to. That was important.”

She looked back up. “Maybe so, but I don’t want you thinking you’re any less important.”

Ryan didn’t look convinced. “Not like there’s some asteroid floating out there with my name, is there?”

“Not one I’ve heard of yet,” the Doctor said. “There’s still time.”

He shook his head, mouth pulling up at one corner.

“Preserving history is what my people were taught to do, but what I’ve learned in my travels is that history is only as important as the people in it. And I’m glad you’re part of mine,” she told him with a smile.

“So am I,” Ryan replied, and the Doctor blinked. She hadn’t expected that. Truthfully, she’d wondered whether any of them were glad to have met her. It always came as such a shock.

“Well,” she said, hands stuffed in her pockets to avoid the impulse to reach out for a hug. “Suppose I’ll let you sleep now.”

“Yeah. Thanks.”

She wheeled about to the door. “See you tomorrow.”

“See you.”

The Doctor looked back once, and they shared a nod. Then she stepped out into the hall and closed the door.

She would miss him. The realization hit her as suddenly as it always did. She would miss all three of them. It didn’t seem to matter if they stayed a day or ten years. Every time they left, she missed them.

“Oh.”

The Doctor looked up at the sound, spotting Graham who had just stopped in his tracks as he rounded the corner.

“Sorry. Were you just?” He pointed to Ryan’s door.

“Think he’ll be alright, Graham.”

Graham nodded. “Yeah, well. He’s a good kid. Grace, um...she raised him well.”

The Doctor looked down and nodded.

“Guess I’ll just...well, goodnight, Doc.”

“Goodnight. Oh, Graham?”

He stopped and turned around. “Yeah?”

“I think you’ll all be alright.”

He smiled, a tight one, but a smile nonetheless. “Thank you.”

“Thank you,” she said quietly as he continued back on his way. The Doctor doubted he heard her.

The Doctor pushed off from Ryan’s door and continued down the opposite direction, back towards the console room. She felt settled now, ready to take on the task of deciphering the controls to get them home.

Nothing about what had happened had changed, yet nevertheless she was assured. The Doctor had led these new, brief friends of hers in amongst some of the worst of humanity — and they’d all proved themselves the best.


End file.
